Financial Times Editorial Comment: Republicans slide into disarray/A protest in need of a sane image

Financial Times Editorial Comment: Republicans slide into disarray
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
Published: April 22 2009 17:17 | Last updated: April 22 2009 17:17
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7a307f86-2f54-11de-a8f6-00144feabdc0.html


After a severe electoral defeat, any political party needs a period of resentful incapacity while the news sinks in. This is especially so of a party accustomed to success, as the US Republican party certainly was. But the hyperenergetic administration of Barack Obama is full of big transforming ideas and is moving at an extraordinary clip. The founders of the US were right: checks and balances make for better government. The country needs an effective opposition. None is in sight.

The disarray in Republican ranks is almost total. Partly this is an institutional fact of life. Political leadership in the US revolves around the power of office. If you lose the White House and stand in the minority in both houses of Congress, you have none. The Republican party has a chairman and minority leaders in House and Senate but little power attaches to those functions, and few Republicans, let alone voters at large, look there for the guide who can revive the party’s fortunes. That position remains vacant. Indeed, one can hardly even point to candidates.

Sarah Palin still turns out a good crowd, yet this compounds the party’s problems. If the Republicans are to strengthen their position in Congress in the 2010 mid-term elections and go on to mount a credible challenge for the White House in 2012, they must win back the independent voters who abandoned them last year. Mrs Palin made her unfitness for high national office indelibly clear during the presidential campaigns. Her continuing ambitions delight Democrats as much as the religious conservatives who turn out to cheer her appearances. She is not what independent voters are looking for.

Eventually, electable presidential candidates will emerge – Mitt Romney will again most likely be among them – but this does not assure the party of a platform that appeals to centrist voters. At a time when most moderates have stepped to the left, acknowledging the need for bold government action, the party keeps striding to the right. The fiscal stimulus passed the House without a single Republican vote. The more necessary public spending seems to be, the more strenuously Republicans oppose it. The party’s political tactics are as hare-brained as its economics.

Yet there was much in the stimulus bill to warrant judicious opposition. A minimally intelligent Republican party could point to the tax implications of sustained overborrowing without belatedly objecting on principle to any and all public spending. A party that wanted to get elected rather than remaining angry but impotent would also dial back the social conservatism: to succeed, the Republican party must be a coalition of the religious and the secular, appealing to the young and to ethnic minorities. Saying what the Republicans ought to do is easy. The hard part at the moment is to imagine them doing it.






A protest in need of a sane image
By Clarence Page
Copyright © 2009, Chicago Tribune
April 22, 2009
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-oped0422pageapr22,0,3496628.column


You can't tell everything about a movement from the signs its supporters carry, but words do count for something.

That's why the liberal-leaning Huffington Post Web site posted some of the photos that its viewers took at the April 15 "Tax Day Tea Parties" protests around the country and posted them in a special feature called "10 most offensive tea party signs."

The "winners," if I may call them that, and their locations included:

Madison, Wis.: "Obama's Plan: White Slavery."

Downtown Chicago: "The American Taxpayers Are the Jews for Obama's Ovens."

Sacramento: "Our Tax [Dollar] $ Given to Hamas to Kill Christians, Jews and Americans, Thanks Mr. O."

Tampa: No words, just a color cartoon of President Barack Obama grabbing Uncle Sam from behind and slitting the old man's throat.

Chicago again: "Barack Hussein Obama, The New Face of Hitler"—on a large picture of Adolf Hitler with Obama's face bearing a Hitler-style mustache superimposed over the face of a picture of the original Hitler.

By the way, I have a modest proposal: Can we declare a moratorium on the use of Hitler as a metaphor for anyone but Hitler? Hitler's in a class by himself. Let's not cheapen his horrors by overusing his memory.

But, I digress. It is not fair to make too much of a movement's most extreme participants or their signs. It is more fair to turn to its leaders. And that's the trouble with the tea-party protests. The protesters don't appear to have real leadership.

The protests were promoted, although not actually led, by conservative groups like the Washington-based FreedomWorks, led by former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas.

The protests did have spokespersons. Lots of spokespersons. Ask anybody at the protests, which journalists did, and he or she instantly became a spokesperson.

You can find spokespeople at the rallies, in political offices, on talk radio and on cable television, especially at Fox News, whose wall-to-wall coverage eagerly blurred the line between reporting and cheerleading.

The protests grew through blogs, e-mails and social networking Web sites and were directed at Obama's spending policies.

Taxes offered a convenient issue around which the protesters could rally something deeper, an orphan movement on the right that is desperately seeking the strong coalition-building leadership that Obama brought to the left.

If one believes in the long-term pendulum swing of history, the right will come back. First they need the sort of big-thinking, wide-embracing agenda that Ronald Reagan brought to the Republican Party in 1980s. Until then, rally-style outbursts of multidirectional rage do about as much to solve the nation's economic woes as a little boy who derails his train set.

Adding an unfortunately sinister edge to the tea-party coverage was the almost simultaneous release of warnings from the Department of Homeland Security. The agency has observed a resurgence of right-wing hate and serious threats of violence after Obama's election.

The economic downturn, talk of new gun-control laws and the election of the first African-American president "present unique drivers for right-wing radicalization and recruitment," the report said. Although it had "no specific information" of plans for violence, the DHS report said right-wing extremists may be gaining new recruits, particularly among military veterans, "by playing on their fears."

The report also cited "single-issue" groups concerned with abortion, gun laws or Immigration.

Such references alarmed and offended the groups to whom the report refers, including military veterans. I share their sense of offense, and not just because I happen to be a military veteran. Rather, I remember too many past abuses by federal and local agents, including illegal spying in the early days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, on peaceful anti-war groups and others on the left.

Protest groups of all persuasions have a right to organize peacefully without government intrusion. In return, leaders and organizers have a responsibility to police their own ranks for nut cases. Begin by reading the signs they carry.

cptime@aol.com